That's Denian productivity down the pan then!

Good experience with Acronis True Image

My experience with Acronis True Image (TI) 2014 is very good. My main PC uses TI to backup daily incrementals and a monthly full backup to a QNAP drive. It only takes 2-3 minutes every morning to to the incremental and I can mount any daily image from anything back to 3-4 months ago when I first set it up. You can set a quota so that it doesn't consume all the NAS drive space (I've set it to 1GB and it is only still consuming 700GB including 3 full images) but I know it will start dropping the full image from several months back once that 1GB quote is reached. It supports bare metal restores too.

I use Windows 8.1 with a 250GB SSD drive. NAS is QNAP 412 with 3x2GB hard disks.

In many ways printers have come a long way. However most of 'intelligence'(!) is in the drivers now and not the printers themselves.

I still find it crazy how my printer feels the need to go through a Head Cleaning Fit when I switch it in to SCAN some documents! I would laugh, except that I know that each time it does it costs me 3% of each ink cartridge.

Actually the code master CD loaders were much faster as they required a special (well, bespoke, nothing complicated) to connect your CD player to your joystick port as this was more accurate than using the ULA's EAR socket.

I think they did miss a trick however of not usilising more than one bit of the 16 available on CD.

Stardock get my seal of approval

I've never been one for installing loads of gimmicky UI-enhancers but I have been using StarDock Fences for at least a couple of years now and was well worth the purchase.

I've not used Win8 in a production environment yet but as a developer I can't imaging TIFKAM being a benefit to me and more likely a hinderence. I suspect if/when I choose move to Win8 StarDock may be a no-brainer for me.